bakerstreet | (no subject)

That was an oddly specific thing to say, and it had her pausing to lift her finger and look at it, trying to even see the lines to count. It wasn't that bright in his place at the moment, so seeing was harder than it had to be. She shrugged, getting more of the cream to move over to his other leg. She'd seen a mark high up on his thigh, more closer to the meat of his backside and she debated on how best to get to it. "Yeah? Does it have anything to do with getting you to stand up so I can rub cream on your butt?"

Well, that wasn't the entirety of it. She was sure there were marks on his back and the backs of his legs she had to see to that she couldn't with him sitting there, but her mind was drifting towards the fact she was enjoying the view more than she should be, and it wasn't exactly a hardship to get her hands on him.

He leaned forward a bit and burst out chuckling, brushing the back of his hand against his nose before leaning back again. "No, I uh, I'll admit I wasn't expecting that." He laughed warmly again before running his tongue over his teeth, as if he was seriously considering indulging her.

"It's alright. Leave them." He reached out to touch her hand, brushing his palm over the back of her knuckles when he found it. "Thanks."

"Nuh uh. I told you, I'm taking care of you tonight. That means all the booboos. I'll even do the terrible, terrible task of having to see you naked and get all the nooks and crannies. Come on, Murdock, up. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner you can put your pajamas on and I can tuck you in bed." She'd already agreed to stay the night. There was a bottle here with her name on it and she could get him tucked into bed, watching him through the sliding door from the couch while he got himself a good night's rest.

That was the plan, anyway.

Matt who could normally hold his own ground when it came to flirting wasn't completely shameless, and a hot flush washed over his face when his senses told him she was deadly serious about this. He wet his lips and hesitated before moving slowly to stand, clutching on to the towel awkwardly. There was a particularly nasty gash on the back of his right leg which stung every time he walked, but his legs got out of that explosion relatively unscathed in comparison to his battlescars-ridden chest.

"You don't seem all that torn up about it," he noted with a small half-smile, trying to feel a little less awkward and not sure if this was working.

"Your burden to bear is getting your ass kicked. Mine is putting cream on that ass." She moved a little so she could see the gash on the back of his leg. There was also that one higher up just edging on the meat of his ass that was more like a friction burn than a cut, and she dutifully dabbed cream on both of them.

There was a moment where she let her eyes trail over the curve of his ass, seeing the small dimples up near the top of them. Matt had an unfairly great ass. She had sudden image of what it would feel like grab it, to squeeze that firm flesh and maybe bite one of those curved cheeks. The thought of him walking around with an imprint of her teeth on his ass had a hot, trembling flush going through her. But she ignored it, tending to him instead, because that's what was happening. Nursing, not dirty thoughts. "Anywhere else that needs it?" Her voice was a little strained, and she had to clear her throat to fix that.

"No! Nothing. I'm fine." He knew he sounded a little overenthusiastic there but he'd gone bright red when he sensed that shudder and her breathing getting shallow while she was checking him out. It was near impossible to block her having her little private perverse moment out with her standing so close. He had his head half-turned over his shoulder while he was clinging to the towel for dear life. Jessica Jones, have you no shame?

Letting go of the towel with one hand, Matt scratched at the scab over his eyebrow.

"Are you done?"

She didn't want to be. She was realizing that she wanted an excuse to keep putting her hands on him. She could lie and tel herself it was just to be sure he was alive, but she knew better. Leaning back, she fumbled as she reached for the bottle, nodding before realizing he might not see it. "Yeah, whatever. Go get your pjs on and go to sleep. I'll put this shit away."

He just huffed a sigh when she started busying herself packing everything up and headed over to the bedroom. He winced as he moved, the cream seeping into the folds between the stitches and grazes. He sat on the edge of his bed when he finally got there, sighing with relief. The towel had been coarse and uncomfortable - it put him off wanting to wear anything. He didn't even want to sleep. Lifting his hand weakly, he traded the towel for the relieving caress of silk on his skin as he pulled the sheet over his legs.

Running his fingers over his sheets - it felt like how he remembered, still smelled faintly like him, rustled in familiar ways - he buried his face in his hands as an indescribable wave of relief washed over him. He was home. The closest thing he had to a father and the closest thing he had to a lover were both dead, everyone else was more or less alright, and he was home. The extent to which he hated someone else witnessing the hyperventilating and the choked sobs didn't seem to be pulling any handbrakes on his small meltdown.

She'd been zipping the bag up, getting up to put it in the kitchen when she heard the first catch in his breath. Looking over, she saw him in the bedroom, looking for all the world like some lost, broken man. Something twisted in her chest, her eyes going over to the bottle in a kneejerk reaction to want to numb any and all pain, but this wasn't her pain. This was his.

Managing to keep the urge to say 'shit' to herself, she came into the room, walking slowly over to the bed and standing there to look down at him, not entirely sure where to start. Comforting wasn't her thing. She sucked at it. Sitting down beside him, her hand hovered over his shoulder before she lowered it, squeezing it carefully before rubbing down his arm. She didn't say anything. She didn't know what to say. But she could be there, if he wanted her to be.

God, what a mess. What a shitshow. What was he doing here? He seemed to withdraw when he felt the weight of her hand on his shoulder, but he relaxed soon enough and tried to just breathe, rubbing most of the pain away from his eyes. Only the confusion remained, giving life to irises that darted left and right as if they were searching for the answers to questions he couldn't put words to.

He wasn't ready to reach out to anybody else. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not even next week. He seemed agitated as one hand grasped at the silk and curled into a fist in his lap.

Half turning his head towards Jessica, his lips moved but nothing came out. Any words he could grasp at turned to bitterness that withered on the tip of his tongue. Torn between pushing her away and pulling her closer, Matt wasn't even a fraction of the eloquent lawyer he used to be right now.

Seeing him like this hurt. Not that she expected him to be made of stone, and god knows she'd seen him be actually emotional before, but this was... god. This was close to broken and it made her physically hurt to see him like this. She bent down and unzipped her boots, kicking them off as she climbed up onto the bed, crawling over him and moving to lay down behind him. She was over the covers, half trapping him under the sheets with the weight of her body, her arm draping over him as she tucked in behind him. They were about the same height, so lying with him had them even, her head tucking over his shoulder as her arm wrapped around him.

She didn't say 'shh', didn't try to get him to be quiet if he didn't want to. Sometimes you needed to cry. Sometimes it just had to come out. If he wanted her to go, she would, but it'd be a struggle for her. He had 'vulnerable' written all over him right then, and while she understood the need to not want to be that, to put those walls up and be anything but, she also knew that Matt wasn't her. He had more friends than she did. He cared more than she did. So maybe he hurt more than she could.

He didn't realise how much he needed her company until he felt her holding him. He was still visibly upset, but he tried to hold his shit together even as everything felt like it was unravelling. Not sensing her being judgemental helped. They didn't have to talk about tonight. No one else had to know the extent to which she was capable of being nice, just as they didn't have to know how much anguish Matt was in.

Difficult as it was to face her, he pursed his lips and took in a deep, shaky breath before rolling around. More for her benefit really. It wasn't like his senses couldn't sketch her out just because she was behind him.

With half his face buried in his pillow, he sidled in a little closer, close enough to feel her breath graze the back of his knuckles. Blinking a few times, he seemed to be staring off into the distance before his expressive eyebrows moved, and his hand twitched into action. Reaching out towards her forehead, he tucked some of the stray strands of her hair behind her ear.

This felt like what they were destined to be right now. Together and alone, simultaneously.

"I'm glad it was you." It could have been Luke or Danny, neither of whom would know how to deal with his fragile state of mind or be willing to stick around to catch him at the bottom of the cliff. Or Foggy or Karen, both of whom he would have rather pushed away than let them see him like this.

His head inched in a little closer to hers, and he hesitated, just for two heartbeats until he could bring himself to close his eyes and press his lips to her forehead.

It was right there on the tip of her tongue to say something sarcastic. Something to pop this bubble that was wrapping around them, this quiet, intense, intimate bubble. Looking at him from so close, at the reddening of his eyes, at the warmth they had even when he was like this... she couldn't do it. She wriggled a little closer, her hand splayed out on his back, eyes closed for a moment because for just a second, Jessica Jones let herself realize that intimacy was a little terrifying.

She felt that press of his lips to her forehead, the corner of her lips quirking up into a grin as she waited for him to draw back. "Me too." She was glad it was her for all those selfish reasons that she could think of. So she could sleep better at night knowing he was alive. So she could be able to look at eyes that didn't see her. So she stopped feeling that weird, hollow ache in her chest when she thought about him. He'd crawled into her life and under her skin relatively quickly, and she hadn't been prepared to lose him.

When she didn't immediately push him away, the tension that he didn't know was building in his shoulders slipped away, leaving him feeling pleasantly tired. It wasn't healthy, letting everything well up and simmer inside before having cathartic outbursts alone or in a confession booth. But this - this was more than just catharsis.

Clutching onto the sheets in that small space between them, Matt leaned in again and brushed his lips against hers, trying out an almost-kiss, idly wondering if not wanting to do anything about how he felt about her had been a mistake.

She didn't move away, but she smiled against that soft, tentative kiss. Her lips clung to his, making it into a kiss and not just a press of lips, but she couldn't help saying something about it. It's what she did -- tried to ruin things before they became things. "What, you can't bounce around on the roofs, so you're trying to see if I can break you instead?"

He scoffed. "You couldn't break me if you tried." He was doing a damned good job of breaking himself, to be fair. But he didn't want her pity. Before they knew it they'd be having an arms race of pity, tripping over themselves trying to compete feeling sorry for each other.

"I spent this whole time since Midland trying to hold on to something I should have let go of. I just- just want to feel stupid for a while, for missing out on doing this instead."

"Missing out on what?" They were speaking quietly, whispering back and forth to each other over the barely there expanse between them. She could feel the puff of his breath against her lips, her hand sliding down carefully on his side, feeling him through a layer of silk. Trust Matt Murdock to have silk sheets, pro bono or not.

"You," he said simply, shaking his head a bit as if he was surprised she had to ask. "You and... everyone else who's still alive." He hated that Elektra coming back from the dead had done that to him. A part of him held out hope that the lie was what had happened on that rooftop and not the fact that she'd come back to life. He was searching in all the wrong places for redemption, and so caught up in that search that he couldn't see the things - the people - that actually mattered.

"I've been so blind. I feel-..." He bit his lip and buried more of his face into the pillow. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Guilty. Stupid. Lost. "Let's go with stupid," he muttered to himself.

"Welcome to the club. I pretty much feel that every morning when I open my eyes." Watching him try to squirm into the covers was... dammit. It was cute as all hell, and she tucked herself a little closer, knowing he wouldn't be able to come too much closer with her pinning down the sheet like she was. "Contrary to whatever deluded sense of martyrdom you have, we're only human, Matt. You. Me. Luke. We're all just people who've had some fucked up shit happen to them. And we have to muddle through that. Sometimes people die."

She saw Hope's face looking up at her, blood pouring from her neck. Reuben's lifeless body on her bed. So many corpses all because of some sick fuck's fascination with her. Her hand came up and ran through his hair, fingers tickled by the rasp of stubble as she ran them over his cheek. "At least you admit it. That makes you not as stupid as you could be."

He half-heard her voice dissipating in the air between them, half-heard it through the mattress mixed in with her rustling his sheets.

"I haven't died yet," he said. He didn't sound like he believed himself when he said it, but the reality of it would hit him in waves, the way the emotions came and went.

Struggling to free himself from the covers, he shuffled up a bit and freed one arm.

"I think I'll stay for a while this time. Someone's going to have to nag you to stop drinking."

"By some weird Irish luck," she huffed at him, watching him move to try to get an arm free, drawing her own back as he did.

That last bit had her rolling her eyes. She hoped he heard it. "Just what I need, a goddamn intervention. I swear, you and Trish are never getting in the same room."

Luck was one way of putting it. Matt was more inclined to think the Man Upstairs wasn't done with him yet. Or maybe he hadn't suffered enough yet.

"I do believe step one is admitting you have a problem." He turned his head towards hers then, a playful smile touching his lips.

"I mean I'd have a problem if you'd rather spend the night with Jack Daniels, Johnny Walker or Jim Beam than Matthew Murdock. Is it- is it the blindness? Or maybe he's too boring for you..."

"He talks too much. The J-boys are quiet. Just how I like them." Yet she wasn't moving away, watching him as he smiled at her, wondering, for just a moment, what it would be like to wake up to that. To have him smiling at her and for her to believe it was for her. "You and Trish are like a broken record. 'Try going on more than a liquid diet, Jessica', 'You look like a drunk hobo, Jessica', 'You just walked through your door. Again. Jessica...'."

"He talked- talks, for a living." He still had a job, presumably. Freelancing supposedly might make it easy to pick his life back up again.

"You could just try shutting him up." Like with the kiss he reached out with his freed hand to pull her into.

"Maybe he'd take better care of you than the spirits," Matt whispered against her lips.

"Seems like he's too busy needing to be taken care of himself." There was no censure in her voice, no biting sarcasm as she flicked her tongue out, licking at his lower lip before she sucked it into her mouth. She tongued it, teasing it before letting it go and giving him a firm, solid kiss instead of just a pretense of one. "Besides, I don't need to be taken care of. I'm a big girl."

The obvious answer is because I'm evil.

No kidding!

♥

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